The present invention relates to a cutting device for cutting scrap metal, the device comprising a support frame, slide guides connected to the support frame, a blade slide connected to the slide guides so as to be vertically slidable along a travel path, a first blade connected to the blade slide, and a second blade fixedly connected to the support frame and cooperating with a first blade to perform a shearing action.
It is a well known problem with cutting devices of the prior art that especially as a function of the scrap metal quality, the scrap metal composition, and the blade geometry of the cutting blades, the scrap metal is more or less frequently pulled into the shearing gap so that the blade slide jams. The forces acting on the blade slide, the blade slide guiding system, and the support frame in such situations can be so high that the maximum allowable force of the hydraulic blade drive is no longer sufficient to pull back the blade slide. In such instances it is necessary to remove the scrap metal causing the jam from the shearing gap. However, this is a very laborious task.
Furthermore, a great jamming force may result in permanent deformations at the blade slide, at its guiding system and at the support frame. A compensation of the resulting deformation is very complicated and results in an extended downtime of the cutting device.
In order to solve this problem German patent 39 29 183 suggests a scrap metal cutting device in which the guiding system of the blade slide, in contrast to known guiding systems that are form-locked to the support frame, is detachably connected with screw connections to the columns of the support frame.
When in this device scrap metal is pulled into the shearing gap and jams the device, it is possible to remove the scrap metal piece in a comparably simple manner by loosening one or both slide guides from the resulting widened shearing gap.
However, with this substantial time and labor expenditures with respect to loosening the screws of the slide guides, it is still not possible to prevent the jamming of the cutting device by scrap metal being caught in the shearing gap, and a permanent deformation of parts of the cutting device which considerably reduce the performance of the cutting device cannot be prevented.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a cutting device of the aforementioned kind with which the scrap metal pulled into the shearing gap will not result in deformations of the cutting device and in the resulting reduced performance and in which the scrap metal can be removed from the sharing gap with time and labor reduced expenditures.